Political Dig

People across the country are still feeling the impact of a Maricopa County, Arizona’s decision to acquit former police officer Philip Brailsford Thursday on second-degree murder and reckless manslaughter charges after he shot unarmed Daniel Shaver five times during a violent encounter in 2016.

As reported by The Los Angeles Times, Brailsford and other officers were called to a Mesa, Arizona hotel in January of 2016 in response to reports of a man pointing a firearm out a window. The officers arrived on the scene to find Shaver and a woman in the hallway.

“Hands in the air!” one officer yelled via Brailsford’s body camera. Other officers then commanded that Shaver and the woman crawl toward them. Shaver can be seen dropping his hands in apparent confusion over whether to raise his hands or use them to crawl.

“You do that again, we’re shooting you,” another officer yelled.

At the 3:54 mark of the video the officers scream a series of conflicting instructions at Shaver asking him to keep his legs crossed, keep his hands in front of him with his palms down, and rise to a kneeling position.

Shaver can be heard begging for his life with his hands up as the officers commanded him to crawl toward them. As Shaver was crawling toward officers, he struggled to keep his feet crossed while crawling. At one point Shaves loses balance and Brailsford is seen shooting him five times with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Shaver was unarmed.

After killing Shaver, police went into his room and found two pellet guns, which he used for his job as a pest exterminator, the Arizona Republic reports.

According to The Atlantic, the jury had full access to the video but didn’t see it, and it was only publicly released after they acquitted Brailsford. The publication also revealed that jurors in the Daniel Shaver case were not allowed to know that the police officer who shot him had scratched ‘you’re fucked’ into his service weapon. But they did hear him testify about the encounter where he shot the unarmed man.

“If this situation happened exactly as it did that time, I would have done the same thing,” Brailsford testified, according to the Arizona Republic.

It is unknown if Brailsford was internally disciplined for killing Shaver. He was subsequently fired. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, the firing was “for violating department policy in an unrelated incident.”

The Los Angeles Times and multiple other outlets publicly posted the extremely graphic video, which you can watch below. Again, the video is extremely graphic and shows Shaver being shot multiple times: